A retro rather than predictive future was adopted for TheCreator
Conceptualising the section of the NOMAD space station known as the Hub
Complicating matters for visual effects was that reference data was not always collected during shoot days
A former subscriber to 3D World is filmmaker Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) who used the magazine as a resource during his early days as a visual effects artist. “I was happiest as a person doing visual effects,” admits Edwards. “Making films is crazy stressful. Someone gives you tens of millions of dollars and then you have to promise to give it back as a profit a few years from now; it’s quite a trick trying to pull that off.”
GUERRILLA TACTICS
Gareth Edwards hasn’t altered his indie sensibilities despite directing two Hollywood blockbusters in Godzilla and Rogue One:AStar Wars Story
“We had a tour a few years ago in a virtual studio in Los Angeles and on the wall was this giant poster, which showed the process of how you make a film, like a node diagram,” recalls Edwards. “It was such an obvious thing about how you write a script, shoot and edit. It hit me how little has changed in the last 100 years. We have all these amazing digital tools at our disposal, but still go about the process of making a film like we did in the 1920s. Personally I think the process is wrong, or at least there are other ways of doing it. With every movie I’m always fighting that. On The CreatorI was lucky they let us shoot a lot of it in a more guerrilla-efficient way. Hopefully the movie looks like we spent a crazy amount of money on it. We ended up working backwards. Normally what you do is design the world, show the studio, someone budgets it and says, ‘This is going to be $200 million. And the only way you can possibly film it is against greenscreen and do all of the effects.’ I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that. We want to go to real places in the real world, shoot as if it exists, everyone imagining everything there, come back and edit it, and when we’ve got the edit finished we’ll design it.’ We’ll sit down with frames from the actual film and paintover them per shot, give that to the VFX company and say, ‘Make a photoreal version of this.’”
GUERRILLA TACTICS
Gareth Edwards hasn’t altered his indie sensibilities despite directing two Hollywood blockbusters in Godzilla and Rogue One:AStar Wars Story